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John D. Mumford

Ascot, Berkshire, United Kingdom | Distinguished Ag Alumni: 2011

One of John Mumford’s part-time jobs
as a Purdue undergraduate was collecting
information from Indiana farmers on how
they dealt with corn insects. During that
experience, he began to ponder the
problem-solving process. Later, as a
Marshall Scholar in England, he focused
on how pest control decisions were made
on farms, and how extension information
could be more effectively directed to
growers’ concerns.
Today, Mumford is in demand for his
analyses and opinions of pest problems
and their management. Issues related to
the risks that management programs face
in the environment are of particular
interest, which has extended his work from
pests to other environmental problems,
such as fisheries management. He has led
international missions to determine
environmental risk management research,
training, and implementation priorities.
As director of the Centre for
Environmental Policy, Mumford leads a
university department that is intentionally
interdisciplinary, with a range of natural
scientists, engineers, and social scientists
all involved in the understanding of broad
environmental problems and their solutions.
His teaching, too, addresses the
interactions of economics and ecology in
many aspects of applied resource
management, environmental risk, and pest
management. He finds great satisfaction in
helping students see what kinds of real
problems they can solve with “an
understanding of biology, ecology, and
some really interesting economics,
management, and engineering thrown in.”
Mumford is widely published in key
research areas that include biosecurity,
quarantine, and eradication policy for
invasive pest and quarantine species;
design of decision tools for environmental
risk management; and integrated
management of major insect pests. He
believes that as the dominant macroscopic
form of life on earth, insects are well worth
knowing about — but he is most interested
in “how humans interact with them, why
we try to manage them as we do, and how
we can get on with them in the end.”
Mumford and his wife Megan Quinlan
have a 7-year-old son. He enjoys running
and beekeeping, which he also learned at
Purdue.